Love Stories (Everyman's Library Pocket Classics Series) - Hardcover

"Love Stories (Everyman's Library) encompasses everything from the unabashedly erotic (Colette) to the sardonically doomed (Dorothy Parker). In literature, as in love, there's something for everyone." -Vogue

"Love in its vagrant and contradictory forms animate these classic stories from Colette, de Maupassant, D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker, and the strong contemporary tales by Tobias Wolff, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore, and Ali Smith. . . . Tesdell has an especially good eye for a classic writer's most resonant story." -Cleveland Plain Dealer

"This is a book about love in which none of the stories lapses into sentimentality. . . . Wonderfully amusing . . . fabulously funny . . . I read this book with a mounting sense of marvel. It is a triumph of the anthologist's skill: moving, artful, unceasingly entertaining. . . . This is a book to cherish, to give to your lover, and to escape joyfully into at the first sign of flying saucers." -The Spectator

"A more cynical celebration than Valentine's Day, which exists chiefly to sell greeting cards and get absent-minded men in trouble, is hard to imagine. Fortunately, Diana Secker Tesdell and Everyman's Pocket Classics offer an antidote to this coarsening of human emotion. Love Stories, a collection of tales by notable authors past and present, show yet again the capacity of literature--in the form of clear-sighted sensibility and the application of mildly elevated language--to renew the weariest heart. . . . The book as a whole ... is a matter of deep reading pleasure, refracting the awful beauty and power of love in varied aspects, times, cultures." -South Florida Sun-Sentinel

"A marvelous Valentine's Day gift for literary lovers." -St. Louis Post-Dispatch

An anthology of literary love stories—in a beautiful hardcover Pocket Classics edition—perfect for Valentine’s Day.

Here are nineteen stories from a rich array of writers, and here is every kind of romantic entanglement: from the raw, erotic passion of D. H. Lawrence and Colette to the wickedly cynical comedy of Dorothy Parker and Roald Dahl, from the yearning of unrequited romantic illusions in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” to the agonizing madness of jealousy in Vladimir Nabokov’s “That in Aleppo Once . . .” The objects of passion in these stories range from a glamorous silent-movie starlet in Elizabeth Bowen’s haunting “Dead Mabelle” and a faithful ghost in Yasunari Kawabata's "Immortality" to a heart surgeon in Margaret Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s Egg” who spends his days penetrating the mysteries of the human heart but who seems oddly emotionally opaque himself. Jhumpa Lahiri plumbs the despair of a husband and wife sundered by tragedy while Lorrie Moore movingly portrays a couple brought together by it. Katherine Mansfield, Tobias Wolff, and William Trevor explore the intricacies of long-term relationships, while Guy de Maupassant, Italo Calvino, and T. C. Boyle portray the elemental force of love in extremely different ways.

As alluring, moving, and intoxicating as its timeless theme, this collection makes an enticing gift for lovers at any stage of life.